Present technology is witnessing the development of large remote databases or “data warehouses”, as well as rapid expansion of the Internet and proliferation of corporate intranets. Demand is growing for increasingly large and rapid data transfers involving streaming video, visualization graphics and large data warehouse downloads over such new network protocols as the Fast Ethernet and Gigabyte Ethernet. The data which it would be desirable to access may be stored across heterogeneous sites, i.e., sites which contain different types of database systems or other data containers. Hence the data which may need to be accessed may be referred to as “heterogeneous data.”. At the same time, data processing and computer capabilities are being built into numerous special devices such as cell phones, palm tops, set tops and car-based GPS computers. Thus, special devices are of a kind whose primary role is not thought of as full scale computing, in contrast to lap-top computers and personal computers.
Our co-pending application, U.S. Ser. No. 09/405,038 filed Sep. 24, 1999, incorporated by reference herein and entitled Method And Apparatus For High Speed Parallel Accessing And Execution of Methods Across Multiple Heterogeneous Data Sources discloses the accessing of distributed data contained in a number of distributed heterogeneous data sources via a search initiated by a single Java script wherein a single object represents the data to be retrieved and subjected to a method in the script. It has occurred to the inventors that provision of such accessing capabilities to special devices would provide a highly useful and powerful enhancement to such devices.